Wierd computer problem

Has anyone had this happen to them?

I turn on my computer and it does the checking for primary / secondary slave & master and just stops as if it's done. It detects everything properly, but just doesn't go anywhere after that (I can still press delete and go the the setup). My one guess is that it's a BIOS and / or mother board problem, but it was working fine before with the same components and settings...

Help please. (I'll be replacing it in about half a year, but I need it now to test the lan ability of my programs for programming )

It may be a dead hard drive. Does it give you any errors about not being able to boot into an OS?

Are they SATA drives or regular IDE drives? Windows needs a driver to interact with the SATA controller on the motherboard. What devices show up in BIOS? Have you tried reverting to factory settings? Have you installed any new drivers lately?

Well, actually I checked and all of the devices are OK. A computer should go farther than that even without a hard drive, and the other reason it's wierd, is that I just tried again to boot it up and it did, and I was close to formating and re-installing, but I just want to fix the problem (it actually starts up about 5% of the time).

It's probably a harddrive problem.

When harddrives are dying, they will occasionally spin up correctly, but the rest of time time they may make a clicking noise and fail to retrieve data. The BIOS will likely still detect a hard drive even if it's on its way to mechanical failure.

Try temporarily booting from another source like a windows XP disc, or Knoppix CD.

You could always try a HDD transplant.